Nam June Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell

When ​​Nam June Paik’s Good Morning, Mr. Orwell first aired on public television on January 1, 1984, it was broadcast simultaneously by New York’s WNET, FR3 French National Television in association with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and WDR in Cologne. Intended as a utopian rejoinder to Orwell’s doom-laden novel about a future society dominated by technophilic authoritarianism, it offered a means of granting cultures, nations, and people access to one another across media. Despite a number of technical snafus, the initial broadcast event was a widespread success, prompting Paik to crow, “Compared to satellite, exhibition is just peanuts!”

This inclusive, even populist, ethos extended to *GMMO*’s conception as an artwork. The piece attempts to capture and expand the spontaneity of Paik’s Fluxus performances into what he termed “LIVE video art.” Paik took a satellite—a powerful tool of media corporations and national governments—and wrested it away from systems of control, coercion, surveillance, and exclusivity in order to rethink the potential of mass communication. The broadcast also presented viewers with an artwork that could not be bought, exchanged, auctioned, or editioned. Paik would return to this material, re-editing the broadcast into shorter, punchier versions adorned with more effects and less dead air. Multiple versions of GMMO exist, but it is nearly impossible to see the original broadcast in its somewhat ramshackle glory, a fact that strangely preserves the piece’s “onceness.” Paik also continually recycled material from GMMO and his other satellite broadcasts, Bye Bye Kipling (1986) and Wrap Around the World (1988), into a host of later works, from enormous multi-monitor installations to intimate single-channel works created in the last year of his life. Good Morning, Mr. Orwell is a work worth revisiting many times over.
—Gregory Zinman

Nam June Paik described 1958 as the landmark year of his life. It was the year he first attended a John Cage concert. Years later, he would say that 1957 was 1 BC—one year “Before Cage.”

For the lifelong student of Western classical music, what a shock it was to attend a concert where the piano wasn’t played, but plucked. Cage performed as if all sounds were equally beautiful. Paik was skeptical at first, but as the concert progressed, he began to see and hear what Cage saw and heard: “slowly and slowly I got turned on.”

Decades later, Paik’s masterwork Good Morning Mr. Orwell struck me in the same way. Writing about it now, I can say that the piece marks a before and after in my own life. When I first saw this piece, I didn’t care to watch the whole thing. It resembled a messy lo-fi video piece, far less attractive than the artist’s multiscreen installations and TV Buddhas.

But Paik said it best—revelation is a slow turning—and I kept watching as Good Morning Mr. Orwell turned and turned me, until what I thought I knew about art was beautifully upside down and I was confronted by a mirror of the present day.

I hope you will watch it in its entirety, so that you, too, can experience the turning.
—Amanda Kim